Posted by Chris Lundie from dialin62.eagle.ca (206.186.242.193)on March 19, 1998 at 22:43:07:
In Reply to: 3dfx vs. Rendition design philosophy, some preliminary impressions... posted by marvin on March 19, 1998 at 05:42:20:
Hi Marvin, you made some excellent points there!
>One of the strongest features of Rendition
>is their superior handling of asynchroneous
>processing
The Voodoo does have command buffers but Glide hides that from the programmer. It's also fairly tedious work to optimise it in RRedline. A lot of game developers would rather get the game out sooner instead of optimise the speed.
>I am still not sure how important per-pixel
>mipmapping really is, though...
It's not a big deal. It leads to a "banding" effect. On the Verite you get a "popping" effect. So neither one is perfect. In the future we should be seeing trilinear filtering which puts both of these techniques to shame. (No more sparkling floors and walls.)
As for the Voodoo's success, it was rather a surprise. It was intended just for video arcade games, but became cheap enough to sell to consumers. Computer game developers fell in love with it.
I don't think the Voodoo has "won" compared to the Verite yet. Both of them are enjoying lots of success and both compaines have many more tricks up their sleeves. :)